“What’s More Brutal Lies or Honesty?”

These days, I am having a hard time telling the difference between one and the other.

Does that mean that I’m losing grip on reality or is there less to grip on to?

As April Fool’s day came and went this past week, the crick in my neck from constantly looking over my shoulder has finally subsided. Not that I’ve been a victim of any April Fool’s jokes in well over a decade, but after 20 years of being the one on the wrong end of such pranks, it would be easy to explain why the day has never been my favorite.

But worrying about things that may potentially happen to you is bigger than memories of high school pranks and I don’t mean delusional worries like you are going to die in a fiery car crash if you go to pick up eggs from the grocery store.

What has worried me is the combination of paranoia and patriotism, fear and freedom, and how we are led to believe that you must feel the first to be the second.

But before you pass this off as another leftist rant, let me tell you that I’ve had it up to here with those jerk-offs too. I’m over the whole thing. I’m tired of reading one set of “facts”, only to have those refuted by another set of “facts” that have been formulated by “factseekers” that work for one side and only seek “facts” that either make their side look good or the other side look bad. Unfortunately, what gets skewed in this whole process is the actual truth.

The whole process gets so ugly that people just tune out to the race and the issues and will basically be the kind of Americans that support their teams (or in this case, candidates) by watching the highlights on ESPN (or in this case CNN) after it’s all over.

I’m sure there are more people that know the exact amount of tears that Hillary shed in New Hampshire and the amount of times that Obama’s pastor said “God Damn America” and know the exact number of years that it’s been since John McCain passed the age that normal Americans retire from the workplace than they do about these candidate’s plans to fix everything that they’ve said is wrong with America.

See everyone knows what they think is wrong with America, but what’s getting lost in the election process is how the hell they plan on fixing it, and it’s getting lost because of all the name calling, checking closets for skeletons and paranoia propaganda that is being spread like out to the masses like it’s pesticides over the crops of the heartland.

I’m over it all. I just want one of them to say: “April Fools! We had you going there for awhile didn’t we? You were beginning to think we were just typical politicians….boy were you wrong.”

But that’s the point. We aren’t wrong. And I’m almost certain that I’m not delusional either (at least not about this).

Everything you do in your adult life, you are told to question, or at the very least, be wary of.

People talk trash on the media all the time, and there was a time that I aspired to be part of that group until I became part of it, and realized how dumb it is to aspire to be part of something that claims to expose the truth and most of them can barely write in complete sentences.

According to your nightly news, something in your house, your basement, your cupboards, your plates, your drinking water, your beef stroganoff is going to kill you. If not today, then someday. The only way to prepare yourself for this untimely death by beef stroganoff ingredients is to watch their entire newscast till they give you a 35 second voice-over story that they pulled from the AP news wire.

Then the following week, a study is done to refute the finding of this most recent study. One week, red wine will make you live till you are 128 years old, the next week, red wine is going to make your heart explode. One week, a candidate is the new hybrid of JFK, MLK, and RFK that will bring down together everyone from the Taliban to the KKK and the next week he’s a turban wearing Muslim that hates America, can’t answer the phone properly at 3 am, and his name sounds too evil.

The crap that people believe at either end of extremes makes me want to go into a Sam’s Club and just start pulling pallets of canned green beans down on them.

Maybe politics would be easier to get behind if it weren’t so damn transparent at how evil it is. At least with religion, there is an invisible entity called God that we can put blind faith in and believe that all is going to be okay, but with politics, who do you put trust in?

I’m beginning to think that leaders in this country are as good at leading as TV personalities are at having a personality.

I’ll take brutal honesty any day over brutal lies, but nothing that I hear sounds honest in any way, shape or form. What’s worse, is that I don’t think that politicians believe the public can handle it.

Perhaps it’s because we’ve become jaded, or cynical, or borderline delusional.

If that’s the case, how are we going to get anything accomplished from here?

Do we just go back to being mindless sheep that just do what they’re told?

I can only imagine that if we did that, we would all be fools.

Yet, if we did that, at least we would know the exact point when cynicism should officially end and widespread paranoia should officially begin.

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